by Tim Weaver
‘What did he say?’ I asked.
‘He said they never found out who did it, that the Met told him they suspected it was some heroin addict from Barnsbury who had robbed an old lady the month before in the same way. He said …’ Healy stopped, eyes shimmering in the half-light of the room. ‘He said, about a year after she died, he put the house on the market. “It was four walls with bad memories” – that’s what he said to me. He didn’t want to be there any more. Too many ghosts. Six months after that, he finally sold the house and started to clear it out, getting ready for the move.’
I studied Healy. ‘Did he find something?’
‘He said he’d gone up into their attic and stumbled across a load of unsorted boxes. He sat there and went through them, and in one of the boxes he finds all the research that Stourcroft had got together for A Seaside in the City – including the new notes she’d added for the revised edition.’
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘What revised edition?’
Healy’s eyes moved beyond me, into the darkness, as if searching for something. ‘Before her death, Stourcroft had been planning to update the book.’
‘Update A Seaside in the City?’
He nodded.
‘But that book sold nothing.’
‘I know.’
‘So her big plan in 2010, after coming off Invisible Ripper, was to go back to a book that had sunk without trace in 2002? That doesn’t make any kind of sense. How was she planning to update it?’
‘She had new information.’
‘You mean these notes she’d kept in the box?’
‘Yeah. In 2008, before she published Invisible Ripper, she spoke to this guy, Winston Cowdrey, who lived in Wapping, close to the pier. The reason she wanted to speak to him was because back in the 1950s he was over in west London, living in the same building as Eldon Simmons. You know who he is?’
‘The Invisible Ripper.’
‘Right. So, Stourcroft interviews Cowdrey about what living in the same building as Eldon Simmons was like, what Simmons himself was like, whatever else she needed for Invisible Ripper, and then they finish up and Cowdrey starts asking her about what else she’s written. She goes through the list, and when she mentions A Seaside in the City, he says he’s always maintained a passing interest in the pier, and she says she’ll send him a copy of the book, and they start talking about its history, that sort of thing. Then, out of the blue, Cowdrey begins telling Stourcroft about this weird thing that happened on the pier in September 2007.’
‘Two thousand and seven?’
‘Yeah. Way before the twins, way before Stourcroft was killed. Anyway, Cowdrey’s living-room window looks out over the pier, and he tells Stourcroft that he was up – when he couldn’t sleep one night – watching television, and he thought he could see movement, down by the water’s edge. This is, like, two in the morning. So he goes to the window … and there’s this guy, out on the pier.’
‘What do you mean, “out on it”?’
‘I mean, on the other side of the locked gates.’
‘On the promenade?’
Healy nodded.
‘Doing what?’
‘He’s walking towards the pavilion. Cowdrey watches him all the way up, and then this guy goes inside the pavilion. He spends about half an hour in there, before he comes back out again. Cowdrey says the guy’s got a hood up on his coat now, because it’s started to rain, making it hard to see his face. But he watches this guy return, unlock the gates, relock them, then – about twenty feet from the front of Cowdrey’s place – he realizes why it’s so hard to see Mystery Man’s face.’
‘Because he’s wearing a mask.’
‘Right.’
Grankin.
‘Stourcroft’s husband told you all this?’
Healy started shaking his head. ‘No. He’d just looked through some of the notes she’d left in the box. The rest, I read myself.’
‘He gave you her research?’
He didn’t answer, bringing the torch up from his side, the light changing in the room. Shadows shifted and crawled as he directed the penlight to the wall opposite the sketches of the mask. I turned towards a space about halfway up, where Healy had pinned a series of printouts and bits of paperwork, in two lines of ten. On the top row was the transcript from the interview Stourcroft had done with Winston Cowdrey; on the bottom were seven pages of handwritten notes that she must have made. Then, right at the end of the bottom row, there were photocopies of three newspaper stories, each one featuring the same picture of a couple in their twenties, arm in arm, somewhere tropical.
‘What’s this?’ I said, stepping closer to one of the reports. NEWLY-WEDS MISSING AFTER NIGHT OUT. Beneath that, the sub-headline read: London couple, Neil and Ana Yost, had only been married two weeks. Next to that was a second headline, from a different paper: FAMILY CONCERNED FOR ‘PICTURE BOOK’ COUPLE. Finally, the last was a printout from a tabloid: HONEYMOON HEARTACHE. All the stories were published on the same date: Friday 22 September 2007.
September 2007.
The same month that Winston Cowdrey had seen Grankin at the pier.
‘Take a look at the tabloid story,’ Healy said.
He’d circled one of the paragraphs about midway down. Under the crosshead PARTYGOERS was a description of how the Yosts had attended a fancy-dress charity ball in the West End, the night before their disappearance.
One witness described seeing the couple talking to a man in ‘Phantom of the Opera-style’ fancy dress. ‘Except he was wearing a full grey mask,’ the witness told police. Someone else there that night also reportedly told investigators he overheard Neil and Ana talking to the same man, and that the man had a ‘foreign accent, possibly Eastern European’.
Grankin again.
I looked back at Healy. ‘Who are the couple?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But these stories were in with the transcript?’
‘Yeah.’
I moved towards the handwritten notes. ‘And these?’
‘They’re in shorthand. I can’t read them.’
I knelt down in front of them. I learned Pitman shorthand back when I’d started as a journalist, and knew a little of Gregg shorthand too, which was more popular in the States. But this was neither. ‘It’s not shorthand,’ I said.
‘What is it then?’
I traced the lines of Stourcroft’s words with my finger, the paper crackling against my skin in the silence of the house. ‘It’s something she must have developed,’ I said. ‘An insurance policy against this – against this falling into the wrong hands.’
It was impenetrable, indecipherable.
I returned to the newspaper stories.
‘What would Grankin want with that couple?’
I failed to notice at first that Healy hadn’t replied, my thoughts on what Winston Cowdrey had told Carla Stourcroft: that Grankin had been on the pier, inside the pavilion, years after its closure.
I turned and looked back across my shoulder at him.
‘Healy?’
‘Maybe it’s time we asked our friend next door.’
46
East’s eyes widened as he saw us enter, and he made a muted sound behind the duct tape: a whimper, followed by a muffled plea for mercy. As Healy’s penlight illuminated him, I saw for the first time that there was blood on East’s face.
‘What did you do to him?’ I said.
Healy glanced at me, eyes narrowing. ‘If you don’t want to be here, you know where the door is.’ He gestured with the penlight. ‘In case your short-term memory is playing up, he’s got that family’s blood on his hands.’
East looked at me, wide-eyed, and started shaking his head.
‘You saying you don’t?’ Healy frowned, taking a step closer, and it was like there was life in him again. The anger – the resentment he felt for East – was oil, easing his joints. Calvin East continued shaking his head.
‘Really?’ Healy said. He paused there, a few feet
away, East’s eyes on him. There were beads of sweat on East’s forehead, even though it was cold and damp in the house. ‘You’re perspiring, you little shite. You nervous about something?’
‘How did you get him here?’ I said.
‘I lied to him.’ He flicked a look at East, eyes moving from the sweat to the blood, and then back to me. ‘I’ve spent the past two weeks pretending to be an antiques dealer. I’ve been chatting to him on the phone, built this whole story about how I had an old chair that my grandfather had given me. When I called him tonight, he dropped this hint that he wasn’t supposed to go out – that he’d been told to stay home – and when I thought of the reasons why, I kept coming back to the same thing: you. That was when I realized you had the book, that you’d picked up his trail – even though I didn’t know how far behind me you were. So I kept at him, and told him I had another buyer interested – and eventually I lured him down here with the promise of a late-night sale. And when he arrived, I did what I had to do.’
Healy had brought the satchel in with him, and as he said I did what I had to do, he opened up the flap and reached inside. He removed a 9mm pistol.
‘Where the hell did you get that?’
He shrugged. ‘Who cares?’
‘It’s a gun, Healy.’
‘I know what it is. How else was I going to get him in here?’ He signalled to himself, using the gun like a conductor’s baton. ‘I didn’t think I’d be able to overpower him – did you?’
‘What are we going to do with him?’
‘What do you think we’re going to do with him?’
‘I don’t mean now.’
I mean after he’s answered our questions.
Healy was wheezing, shoulders rising and falling, and – just as his body finally settled again – he broke out into a coughing fit. It started off like the bark of a seal, hard and hoarse, and then became worse, thick and glutinous, bubbles of saliva forming at the corners of his mouth. I took a step towards him, trying to help, but he waved me back, inching away until his heels bumped the wall.
After he’d finished, he stayed where he was, bent to his left, clutching a space beneath his ribs. He looked like he’d been shot.
‘We need to get you to a doctor,’ I said.
He shook his head.
‘Healy, you’re –’
‘No!’ he spat, and started coughing again, so bad this time he pressed his sleeve to his mouth, like he was trying to force it back down. Eventually, it began to fade away, but his breathing became an odd, distressed buzz; an almost electrical noise, like a hum. ‘I’m not going to a fucking doctor, okay?’
I didn’t say anything.
East shifted, as best he could, on the chair. When I turned to him, his eyes were on Healy. He wasn’t dangerous like Grankin or Korman, but it was hard to trust him. Whatever he’d felt for Gail, April and Abigail, however regretful he was for their deaths, he’d still been prepared to lie to them in the first place, snaking his way into their lives to preserve his own. He seemed to look at Healy with a mixture of bleakness and opportunity, seeing the material decline of this man and, with it, a chance to get out of here. Physically, Healy would be no match for him.
All he had to do was get the better of me.
I moved out of the shadows and across the room. He turned to face me just as I got to him. Pressing a hand to his shoulder, feeling fat and bone at my fingertips, I looked into his eyes – a partial reflection of my face coming back at me in the lenses of his glasses – and I said quietly, ‘I’m going to take the gag off.’
He nodded.
‘But, before I do, we’re going to establish a rule.’
Disquiet in his face.
‘I’m going to ask you some questions, and if you lie to me – even once – I’m going to leave you tied up and gagged in here, and my friend is going to do what he wants with you.’ I paused as he looked from me to Healy. ‘I don’t think you’re a bad person, Calvin. I just think you’re weak. You’re involved in something you don’t know how to get out of. But I saw that little home movie you made.’
Panic. His eyes switched between us.
‘I saw the video,’ I went on, fingers pressing harder into his flesh. ‘I know you don’t want to be involved in this. So you’re going to confess to me, and I’ll tell you why: right now, I’m the only barrier between you and my friend here. He doesn’t give a single shit about your life. You completely ruined his, so why should he?’
He glanced at Healy.
‘Give me the truth,’ I said, ‘or I walk.’
Tears glistened in his eyes.
‘Calvin?’
A moment more of silence – and then, finally, a nod of the head. I ripped the duct tape away from his mouth and dropped to my haunches in front of him. He tried to bring a hand to his face, where specks of blood had formed among a thin covering of stubble, but then remembered his wrists were tied behind him.
‘If I talk to you,’ he said, ‘I’m a dead man.’
‘You’ll be a dead man if you don’t.’
He looked at me.
He was scared now. I wasn’t going to kill him, any more than I was going to let Healy do it – but East didn’t need to know that.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s start at the beginning.’
47
‘Stourcroft came to the museum the day after it opened in 2001.’ Calvin East’s voice was soft, frightened. He kept his gaze fixed on me, only occasionally looking out across the darkness of the room, to where Healy stood, leaning against a broken, burnt wall panel. Outside, the rain had stopped. There was no sound now. Only East.
‘She phoned the museum, got put through to me, and asked if she could speak to someone. She told me she was writing a book about the history of the pier. Until Mr Cabot hired me, I was working boring insurance jobs, so being interviewed by an author in your first week at work … well, that was exciting.’
‘So Stourcroft came in – then what?’
‘We talked about the pier. That was it. I organized a separate interview for her with Mr Cabot, which was the main reason she’d got in touch. Given his history with Arnold Goldman and Wapping Pier, she obviously wanted to speak to him. Mr Cabot was happy about it, because he’d just opened the museum, and – at that time – he still had plans to refurbish and reopen the pier too, so it was all good publicity.’ East stopped, the tip of his tongue touching dots of blood at the side of his mouth. ‘Stourcroft sent us a copy of the book when it came out in 2002, with a thank-you note inside, and I didn’t hear from her again for eight years. Then, in 2010, she called up out of nowhere, saying she had some new questions for me.’
‘She was planning to revise the book.’
‘Right. I didn’t think anything of it. In fact, we were all really happy about it, because it was more publicity for Wonderland. But then she arrived and the interview started, and …’ He paused, his eyes red from tears, a lack of sleep. ‘The interview was different this time. She was much more guarded, aggressive, and she was asking all these left-field questions. She asked me who had access to the pier itself, the promenade, and I thought, “Why would she want to know that?” ’
‘Who does have access to it?’
‘These days, only Mr Cabot and me. But back at the start of 2010, when Stourcroft came in, there would have been three of us. Mr Cabot, me – and Vic.’
‘Victor Grankin?’
He nodded. ‘Vic handled security at the museum, until Mr Cabot fired him for stealing a box of wood varnish from the store. That was the night they were all …’ He swallowed. ‘The night the family … the night it all happened.’
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Healy flinch.
‘Say it,’ he called out.
East glanced at him.
‘Say it.’
East’s eyes pinged back to me: pleading with me, fearful. I held up a hand to Healy, then leaned in closer to East. ‘Okay, so let me get this straight, Cal–’
‘I want to
hear him say it.’
I looked at Healy. ‘This isn’t the time.’
‘He can’t even say the fucking words.’
He came across the room towards East. The gun remained where it was, on top of the satchel on the floor, but then I realized Healy was holding something else: the serrated bread knife I’d left next door. Before I could stop him, he had a chunk of East’s hair and was yanking his head back, the knife against his throat.
‘Say it.’
East’s eyes were filling with tears.
‘I wanna hear you say it!’
‘The night they died,’ East moaned, saliva on his lips, tear trails carving a path down his cheeks. ‘The night they died, they night they died, the night they –’
‘Healy,’ I said quietly, forcefully. ‘That’s enough.’
It took a couple of seconds for him to snap out of it, hypnotized by East, his voice, the words coming out of his mouth – and then he stood down. He glanced at me, face pale, eyes dark, before returning to the far side of the room. In his wake, East started sobbing.
I gave him a moment, looking across at Healy. He stood there staring back at me, unapologetic, unmoved. I wondered briefly whether he even cared about any of this – about building a clear picture of motivation and reason – or whether none of it mattered to him. Perhaps there was no point to this. Perhaps he was too far gone: invested too heavily in revenge, clinging too faintly to life.
As East began to calm down, I ripped my gaze away from Healy and returned it to the man we were holding captive. He was dressed in the same clothes he’d left home in earlier, just dirtier, shabbier, blood at the collar of his shirt. His glasses – too big for him – had slipped down his nose, fingerprints marking the lenses.
‘So let me get this straight,’ I said to him. ‘Until Cabot sacked him after the summer fair in 2010, Grankin had full access to both the museum and the pier?’